Whole Foods carries a pretty decent line called Health Starts Here. I will warn you that you need to be careful about reading ingredients, because the folks at Whole Foods obviously don’t equate health with being vegan. They define it as healthier ingredients, like the whole wheat flour that goes into their oil-free pizza dough. Whole grain flour, water, yeast, and sea salt are combined and sold in large bags that are perfect for experimenting with at home. You simply take the refrigerated dough out of the fridge an hour before you want pizza and let it rise a bit. Now I know that some people would argue that I ruined a perfectly good oil-free dough with the olive oil in my recipe, and to those people I offer the following alternative. Mince the garlic instead of slicing it and sprinkle it over your dough. Garlic has some natural stickyness to it that will keep the dough from getting overdried and tough. I might also add some nutitrional yeast at that point to jazz things up.

It would have been really easy to go ahead and make a pizza, but I was already planning on a soup for dinner. I’ve been doing a soup dinner once a week lately, and find that it’s a really good way to get a lot of vegetables into my diet. I was really just looking for something delicious to dip into it. So here is my uber simple recipe for vegan foccaccia. Serve it with soup or pasta, or even bake it up for guests as an appetizer. HSH Foccaccia

1/4 bag of HSH pizza dough (or make your own or just buy Trader Joes’)

2 sprigs of fresh Rosemary

2 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced

1/2 tsp. olive oil

1/8 tsp. sea salt

1. Separate the dough into two pieces and roughly form it into 1 inch thick round disks. If it looks like shit, just call it focaccia rustica. Be careful not to push the dough down, just stretch it. I just found out that they key to good dough is apparently not to flatten it into nothing.

2. Sprinkle one clove’s worth of garlic slices and one sprig of rosemary on each one.

3. Indulge with a spray of olive oil, but keep it short because this is supposed to be a healthy side dish.

4. Sprinkle with a pinch of sea salt. I use this incredibly fancy french blend in a grater with a bunch of herbs. I bought it at this weird gift shop underneath the llouve and I feel very very important when I use it.